


My Match

by yuletide_archivist



Category: Scrubs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-12-22
Updated: 2005-12-22
Packaged: 2018-01-25 07:21:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1638644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>J.D. and Turk's friendship is at the mercy of a computer algorithm and a monopoly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	My Match

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Basingstoke

 

 

Every Spring, fourth-year med students all over the country gather together, or hide alone in their rooms for an annual event we call Match Day. Match Day is how hospitals get a new batch of residents: they interview med students, and then they decide which ones they like the best, and the med students decide which hospitals _they_ liked the best, and then everyone feeds all their likes and dislikes into a big computer in Virginia. I guess the big computer is steam powered or something because it takes six weeks before it manages to tell you where to show up for your first day of work as a real doctor.

On Match Day you find out where you're going to spend the next three underpaid, overworked years of your life. It's the day when you finally have to face the fact that pretty soon you'll be done with med school. It's also the day you find out whether you're such a huge loser that there's no hospital in the world that would be willing to take you on as a resident, and the day when you find out which hospitals you never want to visit as a patient, because they got stuck with the biggest losers in your class. And for some people, on Match Day you find out whether you're going to lose your best friend.

Turk and I were friends for eight years before Match Day. Maybe more like seven and a half, since we first met at the end of August and it's only in March. (Actually, probably more like seven years, since I don't know if we really counted as friends for that first semester, so let's just say we'd been friends for somewhere between 84 and 92 months, give or take, .) And we'd been living together for that whole seven and a half years, except for Christmas breaks and that summer Turk spent going door-to-door with his mother and the other summer when I was going to work on an Alaskan fishing boat except that didn't work out and I ended up bagging groceries.

It's not like Turk and I went to the same college on purpose, obviously, since we didn't even know each other before we were freshman roommates (which was great, except for how Turk's mom made us sign a pledge that we wouldn't have girls in the room overnight). And then we decided to go to the same med school, but that wasn't really a big deal. I mean, we both turned down offers from other schools that some people said were better, but it's still not like I went to BMS just to be with Turk -- we both liked the city, and the premed advisor said we should seriously consider it, plus U.S. News and World Report said the in-state tuition was a great value, and there's this great sculpture of a papaya on the quad that always makes me hungry. Turk being there was just kind of a bonus.

It never seemed very likely that Turk and I would end up at different hospitals for our residencies. You don't really have a lot of control over where you end up right after med school. The computer in Virginia makes the final decision for you (although, seriously, six weeks? Couldn't they get a team of monkeys or superintelligent dolphins or something to do it faster?), and it's not like there's a little box you can check that says "I want to do my residency wherever Chris Turk ends up," even it that wasn't kind of a creepy stalker thing to do.

So Turk and I both applied to the hospitals we wanted to work at, and we both got a lot of interviews. I went out to New York and New Jersey for a few days, and Turk looked at a couple of places in Chicago, and we both looked at a lot of hospitals close to school, because that's where all our stuff and our friends were, anyway. I liked PPTH. Turk said County General sucked. My advisor kept bugging me to look at places in Boston because he said there was a great Community of Medicine there, but come on. Turk's mom wanted him to move back home (can't you just see him on his day off, sitting on his mom's couch reading back issues of "Watchtower?"), so he pretended like he was looking at places near her but it didn't really matter, since he was going to be working 120 hour weeks and he probably wouldn't see her very much anyway.

I guess it was in February that this girl Sarah, who I knew from IP (and my dreams), mentioned that she and her boyfriend (whose head never would explode like I wanted it to) were doing Match as a couple, which I guess I must have heard of before except I didn't realize anyone actually did that kind of thing. I mean, maybe you'd do that if you were actually married or something. But I mentioned it to Turk, just to see if he'd heard of it, not because I considered us a couple or anything.

Turk went on for about two minutes talking about how if we did Match together we could both end up with no residency at all, and then how would we pay off our loans, or how would he feel if he got placed but I didn't? So I was like, dude, I never said we should get Matched together and anyway it's a lot more likely that _I'd_ get placed and _he'd_ be the one left out in the cold, and how come he knew so much about couples Match anyhow? (And doesn't Couples Match sounds like some kind of special skate at the roller rink?)

"Wait, what's the real reason you don't want to be Matched together?" I said. "Do you think the Match computer would think we were luv-vers? You do!" (Because we're not like that, but if we were we'd be a great example for gay interracial interfaith relationships everywhere.)

"J.D.," Turk said, "I think the Match computer knows enough about me to know that if I _was_ on the down-low, I could damn well do better than your sorry ass."

"Damn! You are one cocky-ass son of a bitch!" I said, and I smacked him upside the head.

"Seriously, though, J.D.," Turk said. "You're my best friend, man, but I can't bet my whole future on trying to keep hanging out with you. And see, I know we can stay in touch even if we don't end up in the same place."

Turk seemed like he believed what he was saying, but I wasn't as sure. We'd barely have time for ourselves while we were residents - how could we keep in touch from far away? How could we scale back a friendship where we'd hung out for hours every day to something where we dropped each other emails every couple of days, when we had the chance? I heard sad piano music coming from the room next door while I realized that if we ended up in different hospitals in different cities, we'd end up out of each others lives.

So we made up our lists and ranked all the programs. We'd both picked 8 different hospitals, and only two of them overlapped, Mercy and Sacred Heart. Mercy was my bottom choice and Turk's top choice, but Sacred Heart was right in the middle for both of us (they had a great surgical program, and the interviewer gave me a candy cane). And hey, there was still the possibility that we'd at least end up in the same city -- two of Turk's hospitals were within ten miles of my top choice (not that I looked them all up on Mapquest or anything).

So by the time Match Day rolled around, I'd pretty much given up. I was starting to wonder whether I'd get any residency at all. Maybe if I was really lucky I'd end up in the same program as Sarah and her boyfriend, or someone I knew, but I'd kind of resolved myself to losing touch with Turk for good.

And then I checked. And when I checked I saw that I'd gotten Sacred Heart, and I knew there was a chance I might be able to stay around Turk after all, but of course I couldn't find Turk anywhere -- he'd gone off on his clerkship that day just like it was any regular day, and not Match Day, arguably the most important day of medical school, and he wasn't answering his phone, and then I saw him across the quad.

"Sacred Heart!" I yelled, mouthing the words so he could see. "Sacred Heart!"

"Hell yeah!" I saw him say. "Sacred Heart!"

Maybe that's why it takes the computer six weeks; I don't know how it works, but sometimes it really does find your match.

 


End file.
